Frederic S. Durbin's novel Dragonfly was first published by Arkham House. A selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, it was recently released in paperback by Ace Fantasy. A dark fantasy that is a paean to Halloween, it features the adventures of the eleven-year-old titular protagonist in the underground realm of Harvest Moon, which is populated by werewolves, vampires, and far worse. It is, by turns, the stuff of nightmares and a celebration of all that is wonderful about that time of year when leaves turn, jack-o-lanterns light the front-porch steps, a chill comes into the air, and people cavort as creatures of the night.
A native of Taylorville, Illinois, Durbin has taught English conversation and writing at Niigata University in Japan for the past sixteen years. He is also a regular contributor to publications like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Cricket (for children), and Cicada (for young adults).

OZMENT'S HOUSE OF TWILIGHT: How did you become a writer?

FREDERIC S. DURBIN: From earliest childhood, I was immersed in the world of Story. My parents were both readers. My dad opened our town's first bookstore, and my mom built libraries at our four elementary schools at a time when they had none. So my parents were book-lovers, committed to books. They read to me, I read to them, and my mom especially was adamant about keeping the TV off when I was awake. I didn't watch any TV until I was probably six or seven years old—and then very selectively. That's almost unheard of in our society.
Wanting to write is a natural reaction to reading, I think. How can you love the adventure of escaping into Story and not want to be a part of creating it yourself?

OHOT: What drew you to speculative and "weird" fiction?

FSD: Dad was always writing things, mostly for his own amusement—beginnings of a lot of science-fiction and fantasy novels. I would read those as a kid and draw illustrations for them. He loved Fortean subjects, and I loved to hear him talk about them. I knew names like Roger Patterson, Loch Ness, Roswell, and Tunguska long before I knew who the President was. I'm sure that's where most of my "weirdness" in fiction came from. I was thrilled at the idea that the world was full of monsters and mysteries. That, plus I got a healthy dose of the good old fairy tales, straight from Andersen and the Grimms, not the cleaned-up versions.
Dad was a dreamer, but he never finished or polished his writing. It was Mom who taught me persistence and the business end of writing. She was constantly submitting her stories to children's publishers. That opened my eyes to the concept that you could write stories and get paid for it. So that's what I wanted to do, as far back as I can remember.
As for speculative fiction, I think it was the book covers that drew me in. Every day after school, I'd be in our bookstore, and I'd see these fascinating covers that invited me into magical lands and seemed to tell stories all by themselves. Gervasio Gallardo—I'll still buy any book if he did the cover. Naturally, I wanted to pick up those books and see what was inside.

OHOT: Your author's bio notes that the images that would become Dragonfly first began to take shape on the beaches of Japan. Dragonfly, though, is a book firmly rooted in Midwestern America, specifically the rural Illinois where you grew up. How did your experience in Japan inspire you?

FSD: That line in the bio is a little misleading. You're absolutely right that Dragonfly is a rural Midwestern American book, though I didn't know that until people from other parts of the country started telling me that. It's like how none of us think we ourselves have any noticeable accent.
The bio is referring specifically to the timing. I was in Japan when the ideas for this book took hold of me. In fact, I can point to one specific grove of trees on the campus of Niigata University as the place where I first knew I wanted to write this story. "That's the birthplace of Dragonfly," I say. But if Dragonfly sprouted there, its seeds are certainly Illinois seeds.
That's not to say that Japan hasn't inspired other writing. One of my Cricket stories is set in a long-ago fantasy Japan, and "A Tale of Silences," which is my first attempt at literary fiction, is set in a mountain village in Japan in 1970.
You can't not be influenced by where you live. When I write fantasy now, it's colored and informed by the experience of living in a different culture, of learning a foreign language. I can write about Otherworlds and strange beings better now because I've been there, I've been one.

OHOT: How has your rural upbringing influenced your writing?

FSD: When you read a book, you can tell what the writer really loves, can't you? When you read what I write, I think it's pretty clear that I love trees, green spaces, caverns, ruins, mossy stones, and the way light looks at different times of day and night. There's a closeness to natural settings in my stories. There are always branches brushing the walls; there's a sense of soil under the floorboards and ground water gurgling beneath that, and the moon coming up outside. There are lots of animals.
One delightful thing about the rural Midwest is that we have the sunny, upper surface of things—big sky, open fields, honest horizons keeping their polite distance. But then we've got these secret spaces: old farmhouses with attics and basements, barns, whispery hedgerows, and the creeks cutting across the land, overshadowed by thick, dark timber. Three steps out of the field, and you're in this hidden world of shadows. The land itself is like a perfect model for a story.
And in my fiction, there's very little technology. I write technology much like a hobbit would. Take the machines in Dragonfly—the balloon, for example. It's plausible, but it's sort of pseudo-technology, like something from a Dr. Seuss illustration, with impossible pipes held up by wires, etc. It's technology that I hope satisfies the child's mind in us, which to me is more important than the adult mind. The plausibility is for adults, but the essence of things has to satisfy the child. In Dragonfly, the bad guys travel around in a coach with big, zigzag-toothed gears for wheels—for going up and down staircases, the text explains. It's been pointed out to me that that wouldn't work, the teeth wouldn't nicely fit the stairs. But it feels really good to my child-mind. See what I mean?
There's a simplicity to my writing, too. It's not the sophistication of the seacoasts. It's a Midwest solidity—probably an innocence. Look at the characters in Dragonfly, at their relationships. These are Midwestern folks. When Dragonfly's parents are mistaken about the right way to live, where are they? One's on the East Coast doing business, one's on the West Coast making movies, both neglecting their family. That's probably an unintentional revelation of my own values—and prejudices.

OHOT: Dragonfly took shape around 1992. It's been fourteen years since you wrote your first published novel. Are there any others in the works? And can fans of Dragonfly anticipate a return to Harvest Moon?

FSD: In order: Ouch, ouch, yes, and sort of. When I wrote Dragonfly, I loved it myself, but I feared it would be unsellable. It was too dark and densely-written for YA, too warm and happy for horror. So immediately after it was written, and long before it was published, I started writing another novel that I believed in but that I also thought would sell. The present working title is The Fires of the Deep, but that's likely to change; it's been pointed out that's really similar to a Vernor Vinge title. It's a sprawling heroic fantasy that I've been working on for, yes, about fourteen years. In various incarnations, it's gone out to publishers, agents, and friendly test-readers, and no one is quite satisfied with it yet, including me. But don't feel too sorry for me—I've learned a lot, and I think it's only a draft away from being ready. I suspect it might be my Big Life Work, the first book in a series. The lesson for aspiring writers is: you know all the horror stories you hear about second novels? They're true! I thought it would be a lot easier the second time around, but it turned out to be a lot harder, and I don't think I'd better even get into why—that would take a sizable essay. Harder, I said, but not impossible! Like all writing, it just takes time and persistence.
There's another novel I wrote as a National Novel Writing Month book. It seems everybody and his dog is doing NaNoWriMo these days! I wrote it for adults, but I'm now re-casting it as a YA book, which is what it wanted to be all along. I also have a YA novel currently under consideration at Cricket Books.
Finally, what I'm really excited about now is a collaborative project I'm working on with two friends, both of them accomplished fantasy and horror writers. We're writing interrelated stories set in the modern world, often using each others' characters. Our working title is Unsung Heroes. The idea is that the eternal battle between good and evil is going on all around us, but most people can't see spirit entities. Monstrous evil beings, existing partly in another dimension, prey upon humans. The force that defends humanity, unknown, unseen in the night mists, is called the Shadow Guard. Powerful and wise, the Shadow Guard recognizes that there are some humans with gifts--psychic powers or unusual physical or mental abilities. These special ones, because of their gifts, are in a position to be able to fight against the predatory malevolents, but at the same time are vulnerable, highly visible to the evil beings. The Shadow Guard recruits and trains these people to be "shadowbenders"--warriors of various skills in the ongoing conflict. It's fascinating to bring three visions, three storytelling styles to the same book, and I truly think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We're starting to see some interest from publishers, and we're all psyched about it, e-mailing one another and trying to get the whole thing fine-tuned. What's great about it is it's been a way for us to "play." We've been working off and on with it for about six years, producing new stories when the inspiration strikes. Our big motivation has always been to "wow" each other, to add surprising new dimensions. Then we all started noticing, "Hey! When you're just having a ball with storytelling, you do some of your best work!" I hope we'll be able to introduce it to the public soon. [Ed. note: The first Unsung Heroes story will debut next issue, right here in OHOT]
About a sequel to Dragonfly: I've always intended to do that. The book's ending pretty much screams "A sequel is coming!" I didn't pursue it for a long time because I was engrossed in other projects, but not long ago, a writer friend told me about a dream she had. The minute I heard about this ominous figure in her dream, I knew it was going to be Dragonfly's next adversary—so I've got my villain. I recently talked with April Derleth at Arkham House, and she is open to the idea of a sequel, although Arkham House always has a very full publishing schedule. So it will have to be a good sequel. It won't be a return to Hallowe'en, though. I'm going to pick on another season of the year.

OHOT: Which authors have most influenced you?

FSD: A college friend read The Lord of the Rings for her first time just before Peter Jackson's movies came out, and she remarked that Tolkien's writing sounded a lot like mine. (Pause for laughter.) Gee, I wonder why. First and foremost is Tolkien. LOTR transported me to this grand other place. When you're twelve, these places like Middle-earth become as important to you as the world you live in. That's why I write fantasy: in the hope of offering such Otherplaces for other readers to adventure in.
Charlotte's Web is the first book I can remember that made me cry. It also taught me how a book's ending can be sad and intensely beautiful at the same time, all accomplished with the power of language and character and Story.
Watership Down, when I was in fifth grade, convinced me that I'd just read the greatest book in the world and that my reading life would be all downhill from then on. Thank goodness I went straight from Richard Adams to Tolkien—no one lesser could have redeemed the situation!
Lord Dunsany with his lyric beauty, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs—they took me to lost worlds of wonder. Burroughs is what little boys did before there were video games: you could do the same scaling of cliffs, the same last-second dodging from dinosaurs' jaws—but you did it in your imagination.
H.P. Lovecraft was a perennial favorite. I'm sure my love of dark atmosphere and decaying buildings comes from him. One reviewer at a semi-prozine took me to task for naming such an unlikely pair as Tolkien and Lovecraft as my influences, but there is a connection. They both wrote of horrible Things sleeping in the Earth's deep places that ought not to be disturbed. What is the Watcher in the Water outside Moria if not one of the Great Old Ones?
If we're talking authors that directly influenced Dragonfly: Peter S. Beagle, with his Midnight Carnival in The Last Unicorn; Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffmann (anyone who was terrorized by that cautionary book as a kid will know where Mr. Snicker in Dragonfly came from); and Ray Bradbury, in Something Wicked This Way Comes. In that book, Mr. Cougar and Mr. Dark's carnival is a whole lot like my Harvest Moon bunch—and the bad guys even fly around in a balloon! Several people have told me my style reminds them of Ray Bradbury's. Our "way of moving the camera is the same," as one friend puts it. I suppose it's natural, since we're both Illinois boys from small towns. We seem to think a lot of the same things are numinous.

OHOT: You are a regular contributor of fantasy stories and fairy tales to Cricket and Cicada. When you have an idea, how or when do you know if it's going to work best for a YA audience or an adult readership? Do your fairy tales and your darker works like "The Bone Man" (FSF Dec. 07) come from "different" parts of your psyche?

FSD: I don't have a clue how the mind works. It amazes me how we can store the tiniest details for years and years without ever once accessing them or consciously remembering them, and then they come back to us, triggered by a scent, a voice, a place, or a glimpsed object from childhood—or in a dream.
My gut feeling is that my stories all come from the same place in my psyche. The evidence I'd present is the ones out there and published. When I'm writing YA, I don't write "for children." I write stories that grab hold of me, that I'd like to read—period. Look at my Cricket stories: all but one involve murder, monsters, destruction, and/or the threat of death for the main character. Age level affects how much dark detail and violence I actually show, but my core material doesn't change. When I wrote "The Bone Man," a friend snickered and said, "I bet this one isn't going to Cricket!" No—but framed just a little differently, it certainly could be a children's story. It still appeals to the child-mind in me. That's precisely why it works at all. When we experience any story viscerally, it's the child in us experiencing it. So in that sense, I'm always writing for children.
About stories fitting different markets, I almost always start out thinking of the magazine I'm aiming for. I wrote "The Gift" for Mooreeffoc. I wrote "The Bone Man" for MFSF. It's like I hold up a Cricket-shaped basket and catch an idea that's the right size to fit the basket. That's why they tell you to study magazines you're planning to submit to. What happened with "A Tale of Silences" was that I started out writing it for Cricket, and a little way in, I realized it wasn't the right-sized story for pre-teens. Telling it required too many subtle details about the main character and his life. It spilled over the edges of the basket, but it fit the Cicada-shaped basket I had nearby.
But no, I think that all the ideas, all the stories come flowing up from the same enchanted river. And they're all for "children."

OHOT: That would come as a surprise to some parents reading a story like "The Bone Man." You say it could be told from a slightly different angle and be fine for a magazine like Cricket, but I suspect many parents would look at this story and think, "Even with the violent ending toned down, this would give my child nightmares."

FSD: I was talking about the core horror element in "The Bone Man," not the plot. If I were writing it for a children's market, I wouldn't make the main character a hit man. He wouldn't have a gun. The beginning, middle, and ending would all be different. I don't want to give away the story for those who haven't read it, but I'd argue that what really makes the tale scary—its central idea—could be used in a children's story. Because, again, it's the child in all of us who hungers for that sort of thing. If we weren't children deep inside, we'd have no use for a story like this. When people truly bury or abandon or forget their child-mind, they turn away from fiction altogether. A story, after all, is a bunch of lies, "no more yielding than a dream." Children live and play there. That twelve-year-old inside us goes and lives in Middle-earth.

OHOT: You mentioned that you grew up reading Grimm's fairy tales—the real stuff, not the expurgated versions. Do you think a dose of terror is healthy for young imaginations?

FSD: We have to be very careful how we define "terror." It is most definitely not healthy to expose children to the cruelty, gore, and sickness that run so rampant today in the horror genre. A friend of mine says, "It matters what images we put into our minds, because we'll never, ever get them out." That's true for adults, and it's even truer for minds that are young, impressionable, and in full absorption mode.
That having been said, it's also true that no one can shelter kids from scary ideas. Kids will encounter horror. On the one hand, they have life experiences: pets die, relatives die, people get hurt, and you always hear things. On the other hand, kids seek out horror. There's a monster in the basement, they know, because they've got their ears pressed to the basement door, they've opened it a crack, they've tiptoed down to the third, squeaky step. Kids will find things to be terrified of. I was so scared of a moss troll doll that my mom had to hide it in a drawer. Every year or so I'd beg her to get it out again, and she'd finally oblige, and I'd be so scared she'd have to hide it again. See? It's the moth to the flame. Kids passionately want to be scared in a safe environment.
That environment is the key. If a child is happy and secure, with parents who behave like parents, he or she has a sense of perspective. There's a line between real life and the Dark Woods. In that situation, yes, fictional horror can be a delight and, like any good story, can help kids grow. But I make a distinction here between scary stories and the sick, disturbing stories of cruelty—those aren't good for anyone. And I can only pray God help the children who don't have a healthy, safe environment. As fantasists, with our stories of dedication, love, and the triumph of goodness, we try to throw those kids a lifeline.

OHOT: At first you weren't sure if there would be a market for a work like Dragonfly, being that it had too much horror for YA and too much warmth and happiness for the horror market. Some reviews of the book I have read express that same ambivalence—while their overall assessment of the book is enthusiastic, they are not sure how to "categorize" it. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old girl, but much of what she experiences is quite horrific, up to and including the threat of murder and the violent death of someone she holds dear. Arkham House, Sci Fi Book Club, and Ace all marketed it as straight horror/dark fantasy. Do you find it appeals more to a certain age or audience in particular?

FSD: I have no conclusive evidence, no demographic statistics to go on. I can only tell you what I've learned from fan letters, from readers I've met, and from what I've found when I've Googled myself. The book seems to have an audience among young women, from junior high through their twenties. I'm not sure what that means. It could be that more girls than boys write fan letters and discuss what they're reading on their blogs. These readers tend to find the Arkham House edition in libraries, receive it from relatives, hear about it from friends, or find the Ace paperback in a store. It makes sense, I guess, that the female protagonist would appeal to females. There's a widespread belief that many boys will shun a girl protagonist. I don't know if that's true or not; it never was for me.
Anyway, I think these younger readers like the book's honesty and complexity. Many seem to judge by the cover that it's going to be too "young" for them, but then it deals with dark themes and doesn't pull punches.
The other audience group I've encountered are collectors of Arkham House books, and believe me, they're the most passionate collectors of anything on Earth! The ones I've met have been men, my age or older. They're reading it, of course, because it's an Arkham House book.
So, I don't know. I heard from a businessman who read Dragonfly on his commuter train to work; I've heard from senior citizens; I've heard from a few moms who liked it but are going to put it away until their kids are older (like my troll in the drawer). I think the letter that affected me most deeply was from someone who read Dragonfly at a dark time in her life, and it reminded her that some battles are worth fighting, that there are good reasons to keep walking until you get out of the tunnel. I was stunned, because I never thought of it as an inspirational book. The effect it had on her is simply a testimony to the power of Story. We humans need good stories. Writing books is something that's very worthwhile. If I'm ever discouraged about my writing, I'll get out her letter again.

OHOT: The title character of Dragonfly is an eleven-year-old girl. You are a single man, no children, in your late twenties when you wrote it. Why the decision to take on a narrator so different from you, and how did you get into her head and make her voice authentic?

FSD: People have asked me this question from the minute the book was published, so I had time to consider it right after having written the book; and honestly, I cannot remember ever making a decision to cast the main character as a girl. That's simply who she was when she showed up. The book really began with two names: Dragonfly and Mothkin. She was who she was, and he was who he was. I didn't sit around thinking of what they should be like.
I can try to guess at subconscious, instinctive factors that may have influenced the selection—or arrival—of a preteen girl as the protagonist. For one thing, it has to be a kid. The book is all about childhood fears, so I needed someone who would be feeling them most keenly—a child. But as you get into the book, you realize that she's actually telling the story years later, as an adult. That allowed me to filter the sharp, vivid, immediate childhood experiences of the story through the experience and insights of a grown woman. I'm glad I didn't plan that, or even think about, before I wrote the book, because it's a pretty ambitious thing to try in a first novel. The book is too wordy and overwritten in places—that can happen before a writer is old enough to learn some restraint. On the other hand, it has a dewiness that I couldn't reproduce today.
Second, there's the fact that men simply like women. When you write a book, you spend a long, long time with the main character. You can only do it if you enjoy being with that character. It's fun spending time with the female mind.
Finally, though, we come back to the fact that the character is eleven and twelve years old. There's really not much difference between an imaginative, book-loving eleven-year-old girl and a boy of the same description. I was that boy, so I had no trouble writing the girl. I just put myself into the part and wrote the character as if it were me. She doesn't do anything in the book that's uniquely "female."
I mentioned the trouble I've had writing the huge, sprawling novel that I started right after I finished Dragonfly. Ironically, the main character in that one is a man close to my age—but I've had a lot more trouble getting him to seem real. I think it's because I've been a kid. I've had the childhood fears. I haven't been through a lot of political intrigue and war—so in the second book, I'm trying to write things I know little about.

OHOT: Having been a lifelong fan of Lovecraft, how did it feel to have your first novel brought out by Arkham House?

FSD: Like an impossible dream come true! When I first finished the book, I sent it out to all the big houses, one by one. After a round of rejections, I put it away and worked on other things for awhile. At the advice of a writing workshop leader, I went to a university library and used Literary Marketplace to locate about fifteen or so publishers who might possibly be interested. Since Arkham House begins with "A," it was near the top of my list. I took the information down, but I regarded it as this legendary place, a dwelling in "inapproachable light." I never thought I'd have a ghost of a chance there, so I didn't send them the book until I'd exhausted just about every other publisher on my list. Finally, I thought "What have I got to lose?" and sent it to them. A blurb I read somewhere said Arkham House didn't want to see unagented manuscripts; it typically no longer did single-author books except for those of the old masters; and it generally preferred collections of short stories by well-established writers—not novels from unknowns. If I'd read that before sending my novel off, I never would have sent it.
I submitted it from Taylorville, using that as my return address, and I went back to Japan to teach. When a letter eventually came from Peter Ruber, my mom saw his name on the envelope and mistook him for one of my college friends; it sat on the kitchen table for a week or so, until Mom had several more letters to forward to me. That letter said they were quite interested and would be making a final decision soon. Now Mom knew what to look for, and when they made that decision, she called me in Japan in the middle of the night. I'll never forget that feeling—and telling my writing students the next day in class that my first novel had been accepted. That was the first year the university had let me teach creative writing, and the students were thrilled for me!
The more I learn about Arkham House, the more honored I am. I'm in such amazing company among writers they've published. Part of me still can't believe that I'm communicating directly with April Derleth, daughter of August Derleth. And I will forever be grateful to Mr. Ruber, who pulled Dragonfly out of the slush pile and went to bat for me.